Creature Comforts

Opening Friday 7/14, 7-11PM
On view July 14th – August 27th, 2023

Artists: Molly Blumberg, Kailun (Quentin) Yang

Creature Comforts presents a selection of abstract sculptures, paintings, and drawings by Molly Blumberg and Kailun Yang of usually domestic or intimate, objects, materials, and spaces as moments of respite, solace, joy and introspection. As our bodies adjust and blend with a newly constrained environment they seek to expand, explore, and discover new opportunities, new meanings, new loves.

At home in our bodies and our bodies at home, this exhibition synthesizes the experiences of a human body within domestic spaces.  With a lens trained on small gestures, bodies stretch, turn, reach, and slump with a casualness often reserved for our quiet, personal moments. At a moment when we are all collectively spending more time in our homes, these artists reflect and explore the physical and psychological effects, affects, and oddities of this unusual cultural shift.

Even with these newly imposed constraints, Blumberg and Yang catch the unexpected joys and intimate excitements viewed through these tiny windows of life.  Bodies blend with, into, and around common domestic objects questioning whether we are all that separate from our surroundings and what we see, or are more an intimate experience with the whole.

Skin stretches across sinew and bone, fat and flesh pucker and bulge, bodies fold, slump, age, and spread with and in contravention to gravity. Bodies of intimate desires or fleshy material encounters with autonomous objects? These pieces exhibit unexpected sexuality, the awkwardness of encounters, dark desires, humor, joy, and a bit of love.

The materiality of the work, the quality of being material, celebrates the richness of bodily experiences. There is an indulgence in material exploration through both creation and process. With planes and convolutions of handmade paper, thickly applied lumps of sand, rough plaster, shaped bamboo, draped silk, and watercolors their pieces can be luscious, precarious, imposing, and fun.  They capture bodies that are sites of constant change and metamorphosis.

Humor often sits just beneath the surface, but one might find it embarrassing to explain exactly why. There’s a reason that childhood curiosity and potty-humor go hand-in-hand: bodies can be the site of incredibly weird, funny, daunting, and joyful experiences before they become so loaded with context.

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Tags: Chicago, Creature Comforts, Heaven Gallery, Kailun (Quentin) Yang, Molly Blumberg, West Town